Nobody’s fool Richard Russo talks about screenwriting and that pushy Paul Newman on the eve of HBO’s debut of Empire Falls BY JOHN FREEMAN

Just over 10 years ago, when Robert Benton was turning Nobody’s Fool into a film, Richard Russo received a phone call. The director needed a little help.

"The screenplay had to cut out large sections of the novel," says the raspy-voiced novelist from his home, "and then to provide bridges, [Benton] rewrote some scenes." Russo chuckles a little. "But those scenes sounded more like him and less like me. And he wanted the dialogue to be consistent throughout. So he invited me out to the set to rewrite three or four of those scenes."

Little did Russo know this bit of triage — or script doctoring, as they call it — would lead to a nearly full-time career in film and television. Indeed, if you want to know why some Russo novels take a little longer than others, take a look at his recent moonlighting work. Over the past seven years, he has written three teleplays, an original screenplay, and has several more projects in the pipeline, including an upcoming adaptation of Scott Philips’ novel Ice Harvest, which lands this Christmas starring John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton, along with the adaptation of his own 1988 novel, The Risk Pool, with Tom Hanks cast as Sam Hall.

On top of all this, Russo’s largest project to date is just about to land. On May 28, HBO will start airing a two-part miniseries of his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Empire Falls, with a script written by Russo and with the leading roles played by Ed Harris (Miles Roby), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Charlie Mayne), Helen Hunt (Janine Roby), Paul Newman (Max Roby), and Aidan Quinn (David Roby). What a difference 10 years makes. Whereas in 1994, the adaptation of Nobody’s Fool was a pleasant bonus for a struggling novelist, no sooner had Russo published Empire Falls than Newman was on his case saying no one could play Max Roby quite like him.

Over an hour’s conversation, Russo spoke about what it’s like to work with such a large canvas and with such a talented cast.

Phoenix: First off, how did you get this project started? I imagine steering a novel this large and full of digressions into print is not unlike your character CB Whiting’s attempt to reroute that river from his backyard.

Russo: Paul was the one who was adamant about this from the beginning. He really wanted it to have a similar structure — the public story of the Whitings and the destruction of the town and the snapshot of America at the turn of the century. If we’d gone to the studios, Paul felt that that public story was likely to be cut out.

Q: Which would have left what?

A: Well, I think it would have become a very intimate father-daughter story. And that might have made a fine movie, but it wasn’t the movie that Paul wanted to make. Nor me. And I hated the idea of losing Miles’s mother as a character, losing that interplay between the generations. I always thought that it was a book about how the past, the present, and the future meet.

Q: I suppose the school shooting element could have been problematic for Hollywood, too.

A: Yes. God forbid there had been another Columbine at the time we were getting ready to shoot this.

Q: Your last few teleplays have been put on the Hallmark Channel, did writing for HBO allow you to take more risks or explore the darker side of small town life?

A: Absolutely, it did — Hallmark is interesting because you can do quality work for them, but from the beginning they’ve really been in a kind of face-off with reality — if it has anything to do with sex or violence, or any of the burrs under the American saddle, you are going to have trouble doing something like that . . . and that’s not just Hallmark, but TV in general.

Q: Somehow I doubt Helen Hunt’s brief sex scene in the tanning booth with the "Silver Fox" would have made the cut with them.

A: (laughs) She actually came up with that funny line there. I think it’s, "Miles would have never found that spot." She was adamant that we spell out that Janine was a 40-year-old woman who hadn’t had an orgasm in her entire previous marriage.

Q: So the actors gave you feedback about the script and improvised?

A: I went to New York when we finally had the cast together, and we did a read through of the script — Ed and Helen were there and Paul and Robin Wright Penn. And we did a read through. Helen and Ed came up to me afterwards, and they both had their copies of the novel, and they took turns coming at me. "This line," they’d say, and then they’d read it, "This has gotta be back in the script." After a while we got a whole list of them together. So after all that, we went back to the director and said, "We have some song requests — the next time we play this, these songs have been requested."

Q: Did you get a lot of them back in?

A: We did, but some of my favorite lines in the script weren’t in the novel. Like, for example, toward the end of the whole thing Miles says, "You know, nobody wishes for less."

Q: That must be strange, having two versions of the same story. Do you ever wish you could go back to the novel and tinker a little?

A: Well, a little, but it’s just a different process. I’m writing a new novel now and it’s just as big and digressive and lacking in plot as everything else I’ve written, but when I write a screenplay I have to be thinking of structure all the time. I can’t allow sprawl to occur. In a novel, you can do something three times. The great liberation about screenplays is that it allows me to do what I do best in my novels. That’s setting characters up and having them talk. I don’t have to spend enormous amounts of time polishing prose. I do that in my fiction, but it doesn’t come naturally to me.

Q: Most of this movie was shot in Maine. Was that important to you?

A: Yes. We were all over the place: Waterville, Oakland, Winslow, and then the Vineyard parts were of course shot on the coast. Mrs. Whiting’s house is down near Kennebunkport, the ferry is actually up here. This was a huge boon for central Maine. It was a shot in the arm for the local communities that were suffering from a lot of the things that people are talking about in the film.

Q: Speaking of which, there’s an almost theatrical element to some of the dialogue here, as if this script was born of a matching of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. It made me wonder were either of these an influence?

A: Well, that’s nice to hear because Sherwood Anderson is never far from my mind when I write. He’s one of the great American voices.

Q: And have you ever thought of writing plays?

A: That’s funny, someone else asked me that recently — and I just had to answer no. It’s never even crossed my mind. Then again, it seems like more of a possibility now, but as with screenwriting, you have to understand structure and form and economy and the limitations of space. And time. All of my instincts as a novel writer are to give things lots of space and lots of time.

Q: Can you tell me what your new novel is about?

A: I can’t say at the moment. People ask what it’s about, and I’m saying, "Well, it’s about 500 pages." But if you really want to know, it’s got another large cast of characters who are teaching me about who they are — I’m having fun, and trying not to think too much about how it ends yet.

John Freeman can be reached at jfreeman4@nyc.rr.com